The forest reeked of decay.
Tao Yiming's laughter had long since curdled into a snarl as Meng Yue's centipede lunged again, its venomous mandibles snapping inches from his throat.
He dissolved into mist, reforming atop a gnarled tree root, his gaunt face taut with fury.
The Ghostly Tao heir would not be humiliated by this poisonous witch!
"You want ingredients, Meng Yue?" he hissed, biting his thumb until blackened blood welled. "Let me show you ours."
His fingers slashed through the air, tracing jagged sigils that glowed corpse-green; the ancestral seals passed down through generations of the Ghostly Tao Family. The ground beneath him split with a sound like cracking bone, and from the fissure rose a grotesque horror: the Amalgam of the Dead.
The Ghoul Gobbling Infant stood no taller than a child, its body a patchwork of stitched-then-spirits. A toddler's bloated head lolled on a skeletal torso, its limbs mismatched—one arm a clawed revenant's, the other a serpentine tendril of smoke. Its mouth in it's bloated stomach stretched impossibly wide, rows of mismatched teeth glinting like shattered glass.
Meng Yue's venomous green eyes narrowed. The Tao Family's forbidden technique was infamous: dozens of tormented souls bound into a single, ravenous vessel.
It was unstable, unnatural and dangerous...
The Infant screeched; a sound like nails on slate, and lunged. Its serpent-like arm lashed out, striking the centipede's glowing carapace. Venom sizzled against spectral flesh, but the Infant absorbed the damage, dissolving poisoned chitin into its form. Moments later, jagged ghost-bone plating erupted across its body, regenerated and reforged.
"Surprised?" Tao Yiming sneered, his green eyes blazing. "Your poisons are parlor tricks."
Meng Yue's hands flickered through seals. The centipede disgorged a cloud of violet spores, but the Infant convulsed and laughed, vomiting them back as a blackened mist.
The forest floor withered where it touched, roots shriveling to ash.
Tao Yiming pressed his advantage. The Infant's clawed hand seized the centipede's head, squeezing until cracks spiderwebbed across its translucent form. Meng Yue staggered, a thin trail of blood trickling from her nose; the first crack in her icy composure.
Her eyes glinted as she began to form hand seal after hand seal, slow but undaunted...
Poison and venomous mist slowly diffused from her body as it began to mix with the morning mist of the surrounding area and as the first sliver of sunlight pierced the canopy, gilding the battlefield in sickly gold.
Before Tao Yiming could deliver a final blow, a gong reverberated; a sound so profound it shuddered in the bones and choked the air of violence.